Title: Google Traffic Dropped from 20,000–30,000 to 3,000 Users per Day After CDN Domain Expired

1. Could a CDN domain expiring for approximately two days cause such a significant and prolonged drop in Google traffic?
2. Could cloning approximately 900 pages into a Portuguese subdirectory have negatively affected the original site's rankings?
3. How can I determine whether Google has deindexed my pages, reduced their rankings, or is simply having trouble crawling the site?
4. What steps would you recommend to diagnose the problem and recover the traffic?
5. Should I temporarily stop working on the Portuguese version until the original site's traffic stabilises?

alexmbiru said:

Hi guys,

I run an adult tube site that primarily targets African countries, although my audience has expanded into other markets over time.

Until recently, the site was receiving approximately 20,000–30,000 users per day. However, over the last few days, traffic has dropped dramatically to around 3,000 users per day, and I'm trying to understand what went wrong.

There are two changes that may be related to this decline.

1. My CDN domain expired

I was busy with other things and failed to notice that my CDN domain was about to expire. By the time I realised what had happened, it had already been expired for approximately two days. I renewed it as soon as I noticed.

Unfortunately, I subsequently noticed a significant drop in traffic. I'm not sure whether Google encountered crawling or indexing problems during the period when the CDN domain was unavailable, or whether something else happened after the renewal.

2. I cloned the site to create a French version

I also recently cloned the original site to create a French-language version for a different audience.

The cloned site uses a /fr/ subdirectory, but initially, much of the original content remained unchanged. My plan was to gradually update the titles, language, categories, tags, and other relevant information across approximately 900 videos before publishing the Portuguese version fully.

I'm wondering whether creating this clone, with so much similar content under a different language directory, could have affected the rankings of my original English site.

My main questions are:

1. Could a CDN domain expiring for approximately two days cause such a significant and prolonged drop in Google traffic?
2. Could cloning approximately 900 pages into a Portuguese subdirectory have negatively affected the original site's rankings?
3. How can I determine whether Google has deindexed my pages, reduced their rankings, or is simply having trouble crawling the site?
4. What steps would you recommend to diagnose the problem and recover the traffic?
5. Should I temporarily stop working on the Portuguese version until the original site's traffic stabilises?

I'm trying to avoid making further mistakes while troubleshooting the situation. The site had been growing steadily, so seeing traffic fall from 20,000–30,000 users per day to approximately 3,000 has been concerning.

Has anyone experienced something similar, particularly after a CDN outage or launching a multilingual version of an existing site?

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

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RoyRoyan said:

if the registrar parked the CDN domain during those 2 days google was hitting the parking page for your thumbnails and previews, thats why video and image results dropped first. check the video indexing report in GSC, it should recover after a recrawl but not overnight

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